


hot blood of youth (of love crossed long ago)

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, F/M, adrien's journey through becoming chat, bc of course, but i mean what did you expect from me, puns, sort of an origin story of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 17:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5710522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Adrien hasn't felt this free in a long time</i>
</p>
<p>Or: Becoming Chat Noir means finding yourself and falling in love</p>
            </blockquote>





	hot blood of youth (of love crossed long ago)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [demistories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/demistories/gifts).



> title is from a poem by w.b. yeats.  
> idk this is my first fic for the fandom so idk if i got adrien's voice quite right, but here's some signature angst from yours truly please have fun

A photograph sits hidden in the drawer next to his bed.

A minor memento of happier times, it’s warmth almost completely locked away in the confines of the dark box. A child and their mother, curled together in the coziness of his childhood comforters. Her leaning over and kissing his head, whispering “ _Mon petit chaton”_ like she always did when he was misbehaving.

They’re reading a book. He hasn’t looked at the photo in years, but the name of the book is stitched in his mind forever. The Little Prince. _Le Petit Prince._ Another story about a lost little boy fighting oh so hard to get home.

Except this is his home. It just doesn’t feel like it anymore.

Not since she left.

Not since his father locked all her things away and the house grew dark and cold. Not since he learned that sometimes people who are supposed to love you don’t. Sometimes they leave.

He wanders the halls, letting his hand absentmindedly trail over the walls as he makes his way up towards the attic, in a brief moment of quiet in his schedule, in an all-too-familiar moment of loneliness in his life.

Adrien Agreste wanders the halls of his house that hasn’t been a home for years and wonders if maybe the cavities of his heart look like the white marble rooms surrounding him. They feel just as empty.

He’s not exactly sure what he’s looking for, but days like this all he needs is just a memory of her. Something to hold onto when he can’t quite remember the sound of her voice when she called him her _little kitten_ , or the way she smelled. So, he goes sneaking through the boxes full of the things she left behind.

Boxes he belongs in.

Last month he found an old bottle of her perfume and sprayed it on his pillow and had to shower before his photoshoot, lest his father smell it on him and take away the only connection he has left to her. He’ll risk little things like his freedom for the chance to remember her in all his vivid senses again.

And this time he hits a jackpot.

An old baby blanket, the one from the picture. It smells like mothballs and dust, but it’s the only thing he has left from that photo besides himself. He couldn’t even find the book.

And then, wrapped up inside the blanket, a small box. It’s wooden and looks almost like a teardrop. Or, if he really looks at it, it almost looks like half of a yin-yang symbol.

It fits him, he supposes. They’re both missing a part of them. Maybe this will help him find himself again, though. The part of him that disappeared when his mom did.

His fingers linger on the latch, and he only pushes it up a little bit before something comes tumbling out.

His first thought is that it’s a bat.

But it’s not a bat.

It’s a Plagg.

At least, that’s what it calls itself when Adrien gets over the fact that it’s not a bat, but a cat, and it floats and it can talk. The conversation about names also happens after about five puns involving cats. Cat puns are so easy. And, for the first time, someone seems to genuinely enjoy them.

His father barely cracks a smile usually.

Chloe never does.

And he hasn’t done one in an interview since he was ten.

But now, now they flow freely and out of him and make his blood feel like maybe it was ichor for a moment.

Plagg says he’s a superhero. The cat puns turn into batman puns.

And then they bond and fuse and transform and do whatever it is that unleashes whatever animal has been lurking in his heart and clawing at his ribcage longing to escape. And when he slips out the window of the highest floor of the Agreste mansion, he doesn’t feel fear, he just feels free.

For the first time in so long.

He’s a black cat in the night and he doesn’t have to worry about responsibility or reputation for once. He just gets to care about what it feels like to have the night air of Paris whooshing through his hair. He gets to care about the view of the city when he’s up on a rooftop.

He gets to wait up in the night, almost a part of the sky, right in that spot between the solid and the air, until he can forget about everything he needs to be when the sun rises.

And then, after all that, he doesn’t have to try quite as hard to feel alive as he walks through the shoes of someone he only just recognizes as himself.

 

It is a week into his newfound powers - two weeks away from the end of July - when he meets her.

Chat Noir is a personification of himself without responsibility for that full week. He is simultaneously nothing and everything. He is night and he is day and he is the feeling in your stomach as you take the plunge over the vertex of a rollercoaster.

And then he is not.

He runs across the rooftops and then something sneaks out from under him and trips him and the pattern goes: He’s Free. He’s Free. He’s Falling.

(He will learn later that this is his first akuma experience) (he will learn later that the thing that whipped out from under him and bit into his ankles is nothing more than a child’s jumprope) (he will learn later that this is only just the beginning of his fall).

And then a red hand catches him by his arm and pulls him up and suddenly he looks into the eyes of a girl who must be his other half of that box, because the both of them share that inexplicable feeling of _connectedness_.

She says her name is Ladybug.

Well she doesn’t say it so much as sing it, her laugh echoing off the rooftops and when he asks her why she saved him, she tells him that she needs him.

He can’t remember the last time someone needed him.

He asks her why.

She points to the little girl, blonde braids swirling around with the yellow-orange jump rope in her hand, eyes so dark and far away almost as if her brain has left the building. “We’re partners,” she says, as if it’s that simple. As if needing someone can be described like that. As if needing him is as natural as them stopping the destruction that jump rope has been causing; so miraculously abnormal and yet somehow so right.

He gives her a blank look.

She smiles at him, and all he ever wants to see for the rest of his life is that blinding smile. “Didn’t your kwami tell you about this?”

“Un _fur_ tunately not.”

That’s the first time he gets her to laugh at a pun, and, just like with Plagg, he is overwhelmed with the desire to make it happen again. She somehow accepts him as he is, without any worry towards his terrible jokes or the way she had to save him just now. _We’re partners._ Her voice echoes in his mind.

“I’ll explain it to you later. For now, just help me get the jump rope.”

His first Cataclysm nearly destroys the entire building they sit on, and he stares at his hands, horrified at what he’s done, until she pulls off the end of the jump rope and a little butterfly comes out. One of her hands covers his shaking ones as she cleanses it and sets it free and everything rights itself.

Adrien begins to realize why a cat and a ladybug, of all things, have been paired together.

Somehow, the universe has decided to right itself again, giving him all the good luck he’s never had in the shape of a girl who says she needs him.

Her earring beeps and she takes off, but not before she asks him to meet her same place, same time, the next day because they can patrol together now _“now that I have you_.”

She says it as if she’d been waiting for him.

“It was meow-velous meeting you, My Lady.” he tells her, watching with amazement as she cracks another smile before she takes off.

Plagg comes to the surface craving cheese.

Adrien comes to the surface with a craving even more insatiable because this is the first time he’s tasted love in so long and he’d forgotten just how addictive it can be.

Ladybug has shown him kindness he never thought he would get while being who he is at his core, despite the messy, tangled hair, and the terrible jokes. She pulled him out of the inconsequential actions of past week and into something that resembles balance. He is now bound to responsibility in both lives, but one is a passionate choice to help and the other is an inescapable contract he doesn’t remember signing.

His destiny is his own, for once, despite the few words Plagg had said about _fate_ after he’d gotten his hands on cheese and noticed the look in Adrien’s eyes. The words he’d said about a timeless partnership that extends far beyond space and time. The words he’d said about how sometimes two people come from the same star, and sometimes they find each other in every life they lead.

Adrien crawls into bed and makes a list of people who he loves.

  * His dad
  * His mom
  * Ladybug



And, for the first time in too long, Adrien makes a list of people who love him back:

_Ladybug_ swirls across his mind in large, looping letters that scream of a love he’s never really experienced before.

Because someone cares. For once.

And that’s all he’s ever needed.


End file.
